DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

NDIS(4) DragonFly Kernel Interfaces Manual NDIS(4)

NAME

ndis -- NDIS miniport driver wrapper

SYNOPSIS

optionsNDISAPIdevicendisdevicewlan

DESCRIPTION

The ndis driver is a wrapper designed to allow binary Windows(R) NDIS
miniport network drivers to be used with DragonFly. The ndis driver is
provided in source code form and must be combined with the Windows(R)
driver supplied with your network adapter. The ndis driver uses the
ndisapi kernel subsystem to relocate and link the Windows(R) binary so
that it can be used in conjunction with native code. The ndisapi subsys-
tem provides an interface between the NDIS API and the DragonFly network-
ing infrastructure. The Windows(R) driver is essentially fooled into
thinking it is running on Windows(R).
To build a functional driver, the user must have a copy of the driver
distribution media for his or her card. From this distribution, the user
must extract two files: the .SYS file containing the driver binary code,
and its companion .INF file, which contains the definitions for driver-
specific registry keys and other installation data such as device identi-
fiers. These two files can be converted into a kernel module file using
the ndisgen(8) utility. This file contains a binary image of the driver
plus registry key data. When the ndis driver loads, it will create
sysctl(3) nodes for each registry key extracted from the .INF file.
The ndis driver is designed to support mainly Ethernet and wireless net-
work devices with PCI, PCMCIA and USB bus attachments. (Cardbus devices
are also supported as a subset of PCI.) It can support many different
media types and speeds. One limitation however, is that there is no con-
sistent way to learn if an Ethernet device is operating in full or half
duplex mode. The NDIS API allows for a generic means for determining
link state and speed, but not the duplex setting. There may be driver-
specific registry keys to control the media setting which can be config-
ured via the sysctl(8) command.

DIAGNOSTICS

ndis%d:watchdogtimeout A packet was queued for transmission and a
transmit command was issued, however the device failed to acknowledge the
transmission before a timeout expired.